Cyberpunk and the Technological Magic of Language

Cyberpunk and the Technological Magic of Language

As the renowned science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke famously quipped: “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” It is certainly true that advanced technologies, such as the intricate logic boards of computers, may seem magical because we do not know how they work, but as Erik Davis, author of Techgnosis: Myth, Magic + Mysticism in the Age of Information, also suggests, “powerful new technologies are magical because they function as magic, opening up novel and protean spaces of possibility within social reality” (180-1).
One of the most important contemporary examples of these magical “spaces of possibility” is cyberspace – a metaphor for the visualization of complex information structures and exchanges endemic to computer networks (191) – which arose from the cyberpunk fictions of Vinge, Gibson, and Stephenson beginning in the mid-‘80s, when such technologies were descending from the realm of literature and fantasy to the actuality of home computer systems. Perhaps anticipating that the technological spaces they described might seem like magic, these cyberpunk authors employed the terminology of the occult as a metaphor for how computer and information systems work. As we will see, this use of magical terminology is entirely apt, as it not only allowed the conceptualization necessary for the creation of our current information technologies, but also articulated one of the primary concerns of our age: that language – the symbolic exchange of information which magic, computers, and literature have in common – has the power to cause real effects in the real world.

True Names and the Magical Metaphor
The occult theorist Aleister Crowley (though undoubtedly one of the most infamous charlatans of modern history) offers in his Magick in Theory and Practice what is considered the best definition of actual magic: “the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will… by the application of the proper kind and degree of Force in the proper manner through the proper medium to the proper object” (xii-i), and gives as an example the publication of a book as a magical way of conveying information to people at a distance. This definition seems contrary to what most people might think of when they hear the term magic, which is either the hocus-pocus of stage magicians or the sword-and-sorcery tropes of fantasy literature and video games. In short we are generally aware of the imagery or the metaphor, but not that magic is primarily a tool (albeit a symbolic one) for getting things done. Erik Davis suggests that by “using language, costumes, gestures, song, and stagecraft, magicians applied techne to the social imagination, actively tweaking the images, desires, and stories that partly structure the collective psyche… which in turn impacted the construction of native reality as a whole” (173).

In his short story True Names – which offered the first fictional representation of that virtual “space of possibility” later called cyberspace (239) – Vernor Vinge uses magical terms drawn explicitly from early computer games in order to describe his information technologies. Cyberspace is called the “Other World” or “Other Plane” and is accessed through “Portals,” hackers are called “warlocks,” and a group or network of hackers is called a “coven” (243-4). The process of navigating through this visualization of information also reads like a fantasy adventure; the hackers have to manipulate symbols, face tests and elementals, and “trade spells and counterspells” (essentially passwords) (254). The story itself critiques and explains this use of jargon and imagery. While the news networks “made it clear there was nothing supernatural about… the Other Plane, that the magical jargon was at best a romantic convenience and at worst obscurantism,” and the world governments refuse “to indulge in the foolish imaginings of fantasy,” the warlock-hackers themselves suggest that “sprites, reincarnation, spells, and castles were the natural tools here, more natural than the atomic twentieth-century notions of data structures, programs, files, and communications protocols… more convenient for the mind to use the global ideas of magic as the tokens to manipulate this new environment” (252, 271).

According to Davis in Techgnosis, this metaphor is effective because “the allegorical and hieroglyphic language of magic works well with the fact that the Other Plane exists simultaneously on two levels of reality” (215). Shamans, Gnostics, and other practical magicians have historically manipulated symbolic representations of information about reality (planetary sigils and runes, angelic or demonic gatekeepers, etc.) in order to concretely effect the world around them, similar to the way that hypertext or the icons of the World Wide Web “function as symbols, inscriptions, and operational buttons; they are both a writing and a reality” (201). Computer programming languages are likewise such symbolic representations that can create realities and make things happen. As the warlock programmer Mr. Slippery puts it in True Names: “even a poor writer… can evoke complete internal imagery with a few dozen words of description. The difference now is that the imagery has interactive significance, just as sensations in the real world do” (252). For an example of computer technology demonstrating Crowley’s definition of magic, one only has to look at the AI the Mailman using its hacking skills to nearly blow up the entire planet, a kind of ‘cyber-magic’ terrorism that the United States government currently states is a very real and dangerous threat to national security.

This issue of security and the danger inherent in both magic and information technologies is made clear in the title of Vinge’s True Names. The power of names is an ancient occult concept summed up in the introduction to the story: “the prudent sorcerer regarded his own true name as his most valued possession but also the greatest threat to his continued good health, for… once an enemy… learned the sorcerer’s true name, then routine and widely known spells could destroy or enslave even the most powerful” (241). Vinge himself believed that “the ‘true names’ of fantasy were like object ID numbers in a large database,” somewhat like modern passwords and IP addresses (16). Early computer scientists, such as Timothy C. May, explicitly used the ideas inherent in this metaphor of magical true names when dealing with issues of “anonymous interaction, reputation-based systems, digital pseudonyms, digital signatures, data havens, and public-key encryption” that were necessary to securely transform the fictional cyberspace into the actual Internet of today (35-6). As Davis suggests in Techgnosis, Vinge was eerily prophetic: “over a decade after his story appeared, the federal government and digital librarians became embroiled in similar debates [as those in the story] over encryption standards, privacy, and online security” (217). One of Vinge’s predictions however is yet to play itself out, the issue of controlling and interacting with self-aware computer systems like the Mailman, called Artificial Intelligences.

Neuromancer and the Spirits in the Machine
William Gibson’s Neuromancer brought the term cyberspace, and the idea of virtual “spaces of possibility,” more fully into the public consciousness, while at the same time abandoning many of the obvious magical metaphors of True Names. Unlike Mr. Slippery, who accesses the Other World Portal through “a certain amount of self-denial – or at least self-hypnosis” reminiscent of shamanic trance states (Vinge 250), Gibson’s cyber-cowboy Case “jacked into a custom cyberspace deck that projected his disembodied consciousness into the consensual hallucination that was the matrix,” which is imagined as “bright lattices of logic unfolding across that colorless void” (5).

Despite the more technological and even gritty, noir descriptions that permeate the novel, Neuromancer still refers to occult language and concepts when discussing the relationship of man to Artificial Intelligence programs, which are still sufficiently advanced enough to be indistinguishable from magic. As the Turing Registry agents warn Case about his dealings with the AI Wintermute, “For thousands of years men dreamed of pacts with demons. Only now are such things possible” (163). Even the AIs’ creators have an uneasy, occult relationship with the beings; Ashpool calls Wintermute “a name… to conjure with, perhaps. A lord of hell, surely,” while Lady 3Jane believes the AIs are “ghosts in the corporate cores” (185, 229). The AI Neuromancer itself echoes a prominent magical axiom, “to call up a demon you must learn its name” (243).

Artificial Intelligences act as the traditional dues ex machina, the god or ghost in the machine, patterns of information that act as if they are intelligent and cause real effects in the world. As Erik Davis suggests, this issue of self-aware digital agents raises the same questions that magicians and ritualists encounter when summoning gods, angels, or demons: how do we know that AIs are sentient beings and not just simulations (197)? Many occult manuals, such as Bill Whitcomb’s The Magician’s Companion, warn: “any concepts, forces, or objects which manifest as entities should be treated as real beings;” just because they can be viewed as patterns of energy or objectified aspects of human personality doesn’t mean it isn’t dangerous to treat them as only non-living (15). The warlocks in True Names likewise treat the were-robot DON.MAC “as though he were a real person. Usually it was easier to behave that way toward simulators” (Vinge 295). Though it may not be possible to know if spirits or self-aware programs are really sentient or real, Crowley suggests, “it is immaterial whether they exist or not. By doing certain things certain results follow” (Davis 183).

For the time being, Artificial Intelligences still remain on the pages of sci-fi novels (though there are certainly many computer scientists working to make them a reality), but the perils highlighted in Neuromancer of dealing with runaway patterns of information are still applicable to our contemporary world. Science fiction author Philip K. Dick worried that our technological environment is becoming increasingly alive; as Davis points out in Techgnosis: “the Internet has already become home to a variety of autonomous and rather parasitic programs – including viruses, Trojan horses, spiders, worms, smartshoppers, and bots” (187). Just because a computer virus, like the recent Conificker Worm, is only made of ones and zeroes, doesn’t mean it can’t wipe out your entire operating system (unless of course you have the correct magical spells of protection, ie: anti-virus software). It is also worth noting that due to the cryptographic near-anonymity of Internet interactions, it is possible to treat other human computer users as merely patterns of information instead of intelligent beings. The flip side of Neuromancer’s artificially aware entities may be a process of technological de-humanization, such as Case’s divorce from the “meat” in favor of mediated virtual experiences (for us, TV, video games, etc.) that reduce us to being passive nodes or routers in a global network of information exchanges, which seem to have more of a life of their own than we do.

Snow Crash and the Power of the Word
In the world of Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, “information is power” (379). We can see the beginnings of this concept in True Names, when the warlock Erythrina suggests that hackers “probably understand the System better than anyone on Earth. That should equate to power” (Vinge 268). In Snow Crash however, this equation drives every level of society, from the global media network owned by L. Bob Rife, to the hacker Hiro Protagonist’s job selling potentially useful scraps of information to the Central Intelligence Corporation. This is also a world very much like our own (or at least only a few steps ahead), full of advertisements, strip malls, corporate-controlled politics, and a virtual network “space of possibility” called the Metaverse.

In the story, people access the Metaverse through “audiovisual body” software simulations called avatars (33), a term originally indicating the incarnations of Hindu deities, but popularized to such a degree by Stephenson’s novel that it now applies to any representation of a self in a digital world (Davis, 223). Descriptions in Snow Crash of the Metaverse, which is “subject to development,” the construction of “buildings, parks, signs, as well as things that do not exist in Reality” (23), could easily apply to contemporary virtual realities and MMOs, massively multiplayer online worlds such as Second Life. Even information tools in the novel, like the CIC software Earth, which tracks spatial information of “maps, weather data, architectural plans, and satellite surveillance” (99), are now almost fully realized in programs like Google Earth.

If the techno-socio-economic world portrayed in Snow Crash seems viably realistic, then so to is the novel’s depiction of magic. Stephenson does not rely on fantasy tropes as a metaphor for information technologies, but instead presents magic as a historically researched plot element, modernizing the ancient concept that language – the symbolic exchange of information – causes real effects in the real world. The central conflict in Snow Crash is the resurrection of an ancient Sumerian nam-shub, described as a neurolinguistic virus, essentially “speech with magical force “(197), which Rife wants to use to gain greater control over people’s minds. This concept of language as “both a story and an incantation… a self-fulfilling fiction” is explicated in the novel through several chapters of researched information, and relies on the Sumerian concept of me: linguistic units that functioned as “algorithms for carrying out certain activities essential to society” (202, 240).

Stephenson is quick to draw a connection between the concept of me and the functioning of computer technology. He suggests, “The Metaverse is a fictional structure made out of code. And code is a form of speech – the form that computers understand. The Metaverse in its entirety could be considered a single vast nam-shub,” but also that “the belief in the magical power of language is not unusual, both in mystical and academic literature” (197, 256). As Davis points out in Techgnosis, language is perhaps the earliest and most pervasive human technology, and the supernatural or performative power of names haunts the majority of early linguistic cultures and religious traditions (23-5). It is not just a coincidence that we use the same word “spell” to describe both the construction of words and the performance of magic. Contemporary scientific studies echo Stephenson’s position that learning new information forms neurolinguistic pathways in the deep structure of the brain (117); language effectively creates our perception of reality.

As we see in Snow Crash, the issue inherent in such operational or performative language is in who controls its use: “someone who knows the right words can speak words, or show you visible symbols, that go past all your defenses and sink right into your brainstem” (369). In our contemporary world, like in the novel, this is done through advertisements, viral marketing campaigns, the three-ring binders that allow franchises to operate, and any and all media and information technologies. We have even come up with an equivalent to the Sumerian me: memes, a term coined by the scientist Richard Dawkins that refers to a unit of cultural information virally transmitted between people through speech. As Hiro explains in Snow Crash, “we are all susceptible to the pull of viral ideas. Like mass hysteria. Or a tune that gets into your head” (373). Information does not have to be self-aware like AIs in order to be dangerous! On a much broader scale, whole social, political, and economic realities can be magically constructed from a single linguistic document. As the Metaverse “is just a computer-graphics protocol written down on a piece of paper somewhere” (23), so to is the United States of America a “space of possibility” constructed from the language of the Declaration of Independence.

One can easily see the problems that arise when we passively relinquish our operational relationship with information to vast media conglomerates and religious or political ideologues like those in Snow Crash, or those in our own world. As Nietzsche expresses it, quoted in one of the articles that prefaces True Names, “The master’s right of naming goes so far that it is accurate to say that language itself is the expression of the power of the masters” (43) On the other hand, those of us fortunate enough to be literate can, like Hiro Protagonist, write our own codes and stories that present equally valid linguistic realities. Vernor Vinge claims that, “up until the personal computer came along, Orwell’s vision [in 1984] of technology as the enabler of tyranny was the mainstream view. But in the 1980s… people with PCs began to realize that computers might bring the end of tyranny” (22). Ultimately, the true magic espoused in the fictions of Vinge, Gibson, and Stephenson is not merely their envisioning of technological “spaces of possibility,” but their insistence on inhabiting those spaces with neuromancers, literally magicians of the mind, willing to confront the dangers and complexities of informational systems, in a manner that upholds our human freedom to linguistically construct the worlds that are our future.


Works Cited

Crowley, Aleister. “Magick in Theory and Practice.” Dover Publications, Inc. New
York: 1976

Davis, Erik. “Techgnosis: Myth, Magic + Mysticism in the Age of Information.” Three
Rivers Press. New York: 1998

Gibson, William. “Neuromancer.” Ace Books. New York: 1984

Stephenson, Neal. “Snow Crash.” Bantam Books. New York: 2000

Vinge, Vernor. “True Names: and the Opening of the Cyberspace Frontier.” Ed. James
Frankel. Tor Books. New York: 2001

Whitcomb, Bill. “The Magician’s Companion: a Practical and Encyclopedic Guide to
Magical and Religious Symbolism.” Llewellyn Publications. St. Paul: 1993